Provincializm #16: Thank-Rock Playlist

November 22, 2007

Provincializm #16: Thank-Rock

by William Bowers

This holiday’s abstract mandate can be sorta barren for us patriotically-challenged atheist vegetarians who maintain cosmic equidistance from our bloodkin. The term for it is even weird: “Thanksgiving” is a syntactical cousin, reckon, of Wall Street’s “profit-sharing,” decorators’ “wall-hanging,” or The Riches’ Eddie Izzard’s “ass-having.” It’s the holiday least commodified by the entertainment industry, possibly because it’s so pre-owned by food concerns? It was even the final calendar-refuge from slasher films until Eli Roth’s fake Grindhouse trailer.

So I…made a playlist. Please feel free to contribute to its comprehensiveness via the comments section. Yup, I am aware that I omitted relevant jams by Dido, George Winston, Kelis, Brad Paisley, and Sum 41. I’m also yet to hear that popular Williams S. Burroughs thing. And I know that Big Black released a Thanksgiving EP, but I’ve always avoided them out of a certainty that nothing music could be good enough to earn the cover art of Songs About Fucking. And let me warn you: even though it was on the 1984 Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack, the awkwardly of-its-moment Danny Elfman song is somehow much easier to swallow if you used to be engaged to a girl who looks like Eric Stoltz in 1989’s The Fly 2.

Robert Pollard-“Thank You”
Tom Waits- “November”
Something by the Mount Eerie-ish band (often covered by Mount Eerie) called Thanksgiving
Something by the psych underdogs Family
Something pissy from the punk boxset No Thanks
Something by the Grateful Dead
Sparks- “Thank God It’s Not Christmas”

"More than any other contemporary African-American athlete, his ability to thrive in the pressure cooker of corporate America, while never making any embarrass­ing 'I’m not black, I’m universal' comments or selling his soul rather than just his visage, makes him a role model"

“Though his work for human rights is unassailable, the books grow worse and worse, the tales of his derring-do more and more farfetched. Finally, without at all forgiving him his lies, one feels sorry for Kosinski.”